Casper Mueller Kneer Builds Loewe a Two-Story Arena in Paris

Loewe's Spring Summer 2027 show took place inside a circular, two-story arena by Casper Mueller Kneer Architects, erected as a temporary white volume in the courtyard of the Château de Vincennes in Paris.

The structure abandons the single-plane runway. Guests look across, down, and through the space at one another. Models move along a runway that snakes between angular benches at ground level, while a second band of viewers occupies the balcony above. Fashion becomes something seen from several heights at once.

Where does the geometry come from?

The design team drew its basic geometry from places where an audience traditionally surrounds an event. References include:

• the Anatomical Theatre in Padua
• London's Globe Theatre
• Detroit's industrial gasometers, visible in the exposed framework circling the room

The architects stripped the idea down to white scaffolding and translucent fabric. The temporary construction reads almost diagrammatically: structure, audience, runway. Everything can be read at once.

How does the runway move through the audience?

Much of runway design depends on length. Loewe's arena compresses the distance of a typical catwalk. The ground-floor benches zigzag across the center rather than forming long parallel rows, leaving narrow routes for models to pass between them. From certain seats, the clothes move only a few feet away. From above, those same paths become part of a larger pattern.

Casper Mueller Kneer treats proximity as central to the design. The circular plan gathers a large audience inside a relatively contained footprint. The upper gallery introduces another line of sight into an event usually organized horizontally. A person watching from below may have another guest directly opposite and a second tier overhead. Faces, bodies, clothes, and bits of scaffold keep slipping into the same frame.

What forms the room?

The material language stays deliberately spare. White scaffold forms the skeleton. Sheer white fabric wraps it to establish the enclosure. Nothing disguises how the temporary room stands up: rails, posts, platforms, and stairs remain legible, giving the interior some of the directness of a studio theater assembled around a production.

The architecture takes on a prominent role. The room establishes how the collection is encountered before the first model reaches the runway.

Runway audiences usually receive a privileged frontal view; here, the architecture complicates that front. Other spectators become part of your view, and looking becomes visible as an activity shared by the whole room. Instead of placing everyone along the edge of one line, the designers build an entire room around the act of watching.

The project continues Casper Mueller Kneer's work on Loewe's show spaces under creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, positioning architecture itself as the frame that determines how a collection is seen before any garment appears.

Project information:

• Name: Loewe SS27
• Architect: Casper Mueller Kneer Architects
• Fashion house: Loewe
• Creative directors: Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez
• Location: Château de Vincennes, Paris, France
• Year: 2026
• Photography: © Paul Riddle